Posts Tagged ‘antisocial networking’

I see the same people on the train every day, every week. These strangers are absorbed into their phones and books and music, or staring into shoes, knitting, whittling away myelin in nano-thin shavings to pass the daily stops in anticipation of home comforts and lifeblood launching points. We’re a group misalignment, disconnected nodes sharing a contained experience, rarely nodding or acknowledging each other. And we shouldn’t.

The domestic life, the stability we cherish, is also a deadening of the weird skin that sets us apart from each other. We blend together on this train, in plastic fleece and work shoes, well-worn lunch bags and overcoats, often a spectrum of exhaustion or distraction. I look at these same people every day with alienation, a void of camaraderie. A fear of assimilation, of normalizing yourself into a diminished approximation of the personality that’s gotten you through this life.

In general, the only people I want to connect with are the weirdos. Artists, derailed souls, unique personalities who shine or fight or live in isolated clouds. And the weird people that I love are always a little weirder than I am, dug a little deeper into themselves. So even then, there’s a disconnect. Weirdness can be disparate, incompatible, and when you’re used to not really connecting with people throughout your life you tend to either miss the opportunities for connection, or just remain in a state of poor social practice.

So I might see someone on the train who is a little more like me. Someone who isn’t comfortable in succumbing to suburban pleasantries. But even with that person, polarities are repulsive. We just want to suffer the ride, read books, listen to podcasts, and get out of the metal box, away from the strangers, away from quotidian reflections.

I cling to remaining an outsider, to defining myself by what I am not. The train is full of those people, and I’m inclined to judge them. It’s the easy way to make yourself feel better. Branding, and then juxtaposition from those simplistic categorizations. No one is simple, though. Every person riding in that car is a mushy stew of light and pain, a real bio-mess. I project labels of triviality onto people who I don’t know, who I would never take the time to know, even while my own thoughts and concerns, weak threads of passion and ambition, are just as complex and trivial.

Prejudice is simple-mindedness, inflating massive presumed history into a thin, momentary slice of another person’s existence, refusing to invest the time and intellect necessary to consider why someone lives a certain life or thinks a certain way. The “suburbs” become an ostracized nebula. The city becomes a distant carnival attraction. The fear each populace projects onto the other is bidirectional.

Here’s the deal: The greater your feeling of being “better” than everyone around you, the greater your failure as a human being.

The train is everywhere. A well-built life. Frameworks and Habitrails. Those aspects we construct for ourselves to stay sane, maybe constraining sanity’s spectrum to minimize dangerous variability. That’s what we are supposed to do, to settle into ourselves, build the base, flourish within. Branch out safely, strategically.

But I’m fighting against this. I want to “stay weird,” which is nearly impossible because the backlash of weirdness attacks you at every stage in life, every age, and you push through it, incorporate it, sometimes bend to it or allow it to derail you into an alternate path of identity. And as time unfolds, you understand that you aren’t the flavor of weird that you once were, and it becomes really hard to discern if this is just an element of overall change, as we constantly change and mature (and sometimes de-mature), or if you’re editing out the good stuff to keep on with a sustainable life.

And that, I suppose, is why I am often compelled to babble on in this blog. Clinging to that Jim-ness in some way.

Absurdity has been poisoned. Slow death, the frog in the pot. And absurdity, the ridiculous extremes of what we do and say to each other, has been my source of humor for so long, the thing that fortifies me. Absurdity saved my life once, for real. Stopped me from killing myself, because I zapped out of my body and realized how weird everything was, because a Spuds McKenzie commercial was playing on the television while I was attempting to fatally hurt myself. Take a look at that video and then imagine that shit playing while someone is cornered into the absolute illogic of tipping over the precipice, of actually attempting to wipe himself out. It was just too much, too freaking weird. I saw myself, there in front of the television, Spuds partying it up while reality collapsed, and my desperate actions were just as silly as that partying mascot. A dose of plastic reality, of a world that wasn’t as dark as I thought it was because the world was composed of elevated triviality. Still is.

I am proud to say that Spuds McKenzie saved my life.

Lately, though, I don’t have a solid grasp on the absurd. People do things that are shockingly thoughtless or, worse, deliberately hurtful or disrespectful (not a lack of respect, but deliberate disrespect). But the shock is muted, imprecise. I’ve been drinking poison, drop by drop, acclimating my body to it, and it doesn’t even taste bitter any more. It’s like being slapped while numb-drunk. You sort of feel it, but then have to work through your brain to compute what just happened, what might constitute a typical reaction. Contemplating, but not able to properly react.

Without that proper and somewhat immediate, deliberate reaction, you take this affront into yourself. Somewhere on a gut level, you know that something was wrong, something bad just happened. So you keep it, draw it inside, stay with it. It isn’t absurd. It isn’t anything, just a malformed blob, a featureless golem. You chew on it. You digest it into your system. It no longer references things outside of yourself. From deep within, this affront become a reflection of you, could only have been caused by you. There is no other logical explanation. You were treated like shit because you must have deserved it.

I went through this last week. And several weeks before that, from a different angle. I’ll go through it again, I know, because I am bound to the people who cause it. In that manner it becomes a game of abuse. Power. A jerk exercises power over you, and your reaction is constrained to interior destruction, or a channeling of energy toward people who aren’t really involved. You need to react. You must react. But you cannot react properly, to the fuckwit who assaulted you, without either losing your job or opening a box of endless shit-storms.

Here is something I haven’t said for a couple years now:

“Really?!”

Remember 2011 and 2012? Everyone was whipping that out. The affronts were flying in from all angles, from jerky jerks to downsizing to paranoia-driven paradigms. The absurdity was clear, and “really?!” was an expression of exasperation, a reality-check, a moment of stepping back and admitting that the current situation was no longer playing by the tacit rules of sanity.

But it was also a moment of pissing in the wind. You blurt out your “really?!” and then carry on, accepting the shit you were just told to eat. Again and again. And soon enough the “really?!” becomes a tacit rule in itself, replaced by an eye-roll, then a sigh, then nothing at all, then the constant clenched fist of soul-consuming tension.

Because the unspoken answer was: “Yes, really. Shut up.”

The barometer twists and bends and becomes detached from the truth. It is no longer a measure of any true environmental variable. It is, at best, an expression of confusion. At worst, it is mistaken for some sort of honest internal judgment.

My barometer has traditionally been calibrated by other people. This is normal, to a degree. Feedback helps us understand our impact, to juxtapose intent with result. At some point, probably a very long time ago, my notion of impact was not just calibrated by others, it was defined. I let other people tell me who I am, I listened to such an extent that I could not disambiguate my own self-definition from the Sartre mirror-reflection of other’s eyes.

And this is the point in the blog when I usually wind my way around to some epiphany. I can feel it coming, that moment when I uncover a truth or some other shit.

So I’ve been sitting here for a few days. Stuck.

I know that I was able to move past the impact of serialized disrespect. It wasn’t keeping me awake through the night. But I couldn’t figure out how I did that.

I wrote. I worked on art, on creating, prioritized my output. Finding a positive distraction helps, a way to shift the energy into creation instead of negation. But… it was a distraction, not a solution. Bringing it all back within this blog seemed like an easy deal, some ubiquitous life experience that rings true for everyone through individual facets.

But trauma has a way of spreading slowly, manifesting unexpectedly. In this case, I was my own trigger, marching through public self-reflection with the hubris of considering myself beyond it, problem solved.

So why did it come back?

Well, digging deeper, I think a better question is: What is the problem?

Disrespect? Trouble with people?

Nope. I had a window into clarity last night. Really, an actual window. I walked by a Starbucks and saw someone cleaning up, winding down the night, going through rote closing actions. I felt nostalgic camaraderie, those many nights I had scooted about, green-aproned, reeking of roast. Those past years. Past years that don’t seem so far away.

I worked at Starbucks throughout much of the 1990s. Moved up and around and down, wasted time, met amazing people, made lifelong connections, watched those people move on while I wasted more time. Experience shapes us, shifts us, challenges us, so I don’t live in a state of regret. At some point I decided to flee that life, then I fled again, returned with nothing, no job, my life a pile of boxes in my parents’ garage, little idea of what could be next. I crawled out of that, found a place and a home, and eventually built something, a career.

My fear is that I built upon a foundation of sand. Just follow my CV, and there it is. The time when I was at zero, and the time before that, years at Starbucks, when I was cultivating excuses.

A friend told me recently that the voice that he hears, sometimes, is this: “Impostor”

Man, that is the truth. When I’m shaken, disrespected, I wonder if these people will just carry forward and dissect my career in front of me, get to the sand. Send me right back to Starbucks, back to a life adrift.

Last week I attended a wake, briefly. I have a very difficult time interfacing with family, and it comes back to the same root. They have known me for too long, and I fear that they define me by the little boy I once was, or other awkward aspects of my past, all of that foundational sand. And, again, I’m using everyone around me to define who I am, incorporating judgment over praise. It seems easier to be judged than to be proud, and to default-assume that this is what they think of me. So it gets added to the stack, incorporated. Another ingredient in a Shit Stew of the Soul.

So I’ve been worried that Spuds McKenzie will no longer save me. Even Spuds isn’t absurd enough for this rapid boil. It’s probably going to have to be me. Find my own definition and reason, generate the absurdity from within. Be fucking ridiculous. Be my own Spuds McKenzie.

A funny thing happened last night. A can of worms was opened, somewhere deep inside my head. And the worms proceeded to slurp my brain matter through their linear digestive tracts until my entire head became filled with worm poop.

Explained:

In response to a Facebook post from Rachel, I mentioned my first favorite novel, A Wrinkle in Time. That took me back to sixth grade, with its simplicity and optimism, and my ongoing love for that story. It was a good memory, one of those warm places in your psyche, a little part of yourself that worked out all right.

Then, maybe a half hour later, someone else on Facebook posted that Ms. Priest, one of my seventh grade teachers, had passed away. Ms. Priest was the first and perhaps greatest embedded anti-establishmentarian I had known. She smoked and swore and forced students to use their brains, to look into their hearts. I added my very brief eulogy to a growing list of Facebook comments, noting that many of them had been permanently affected by this amazing person.

Then I thought about it a bit more. She had certainly made her mark. I used to have recurring dreams of visiting her class, being back in that class, back in seventh grade. Those dreams faded, and junior high became this nebulous transitional zone. I could cite many elements of grade school, and, of course, the high school triumphs and scars never dissolve. Junior high, though, was fuzzy. Chess club was in there, somewhere. And band. But not much else. My personal history tends to jump from a generally healthy sixth grade to some point in high school. A wrinkle in time.

The odes to Ms. Priest continued. Dead Poets Society type of stories. Each one served as a building block and brush stroke, recreating Ms. Priest, her classroom, the halls beyond that circulated through the school. I couldn’t retreat from the unfolding detail, and soon I felt that Jim I was back in seventh grade, sitting in that class with those people, with that teacher.

You see, I didn’t just remember faces or specific episodes. I remembered the exact feeling of what it was like to be me back in seventh grade.

And I realized that this was the first time I had felt truly inadequate, when I found that I couldn’t commit to any particular type. I couldn’t be a smart kid or a nerd, and lacked any equipment to be clever or beautiful or strong. Ms. Priest encouraged everyone to dig into themselves, but I resisted. I was shallow, dopey and shy, and I didn’t respond to her efforts. So she moved on to the others, the ones she could lift up. I puttered along, a failure and a disappointment. And that phase of inadequacy has stayed with me since then, even through today.

This isn’t some sort of indictment. I still have positive memories of this full-throttle teacher. But I also remember other students bonding into cliques that would evolve straight on into high school. And I remember loners, intellectuals and athletes— all of them not-me. I’m not sure how much identity one is supposed to grasp in seventh grade, but I didn’t have much.

This was also a period in which my mom was severing religious ties. I had grown up as a Jehovah’s Witness, and some time around seventh grade we had stopped going, and she was ultimately disfellowshipped (for some really petty reasons). I don’t recall it bothering me much at the time (other than being concerned about her emotional ordeal), but it was a period of personal upheaval, a sharp shift away from lifelong de facto relationships.

I suppose that people who have spent time in therapeutic counseling have already navigated these epiphanies. I’m not used to unearthing the secrets of my past. It isn’t that I “don’t go there,” it just never comes up, and, apparently, this was was buried deep. Most people can reflect on their own souls and come up with a pretty good collection of traits and trends, historical arcs. It’s rare that you are able to pinpoint a defining moment that carries through your personality with such persistence. I’ve fought with the same problems we all have: depression, self-doubt, social awkwardness. However, I think I just uncovered the exact time period when it became real and anodized. The birth of a part of myself that I hate.

And I have to say: this isn’t particularly liberating. It feels like a sac of poison has been accidentally lanced. This social clumsiness and cluelessness is now measurable. I have been knee-deep in it for 32 years. The pain of this realization is extremely personal and isolating. Yet I think everyone has experienced that lonely pain, something you just can’t communicate to other people because it’s embedded into your core. Something you force yourself to carry.

I apologize for such a self-indulgent post. I’m not sure if I have a point, here, other than the fact that I never stood on a desk and pulled that “Oh captain my captain” shit. But I suppose there could be an upside. Time has become unwrinkled, flattened and exposed. I can take that forgotten memory as a cornerstone. I can build out into those two years of junior high and piece that history back together. And, if anything, pain and history feed art, so I suppose Ms. Priest will be making an appearance in some future story, manifest as either glorious or terrible. She probably would have liked that.

I’m just inching past the age of 40.5, and, as I sort my thoughts for another Megablog brain dump, I’m realizing that I am well on my way to becoming an Old Man. This isn’t a statement of middle-aged regret. I’m feeling pretty good about my age, and I recognize that any age level changes with temporal perspective. I was in Colorado just after I turned 30, and recall meeting a couple in their late-20s. When I told them I had just turned 30, they both groaned, as if that was the inevitable Wall of Age. Even then, it was completely absurd. I knew that 30 was generally pretty young, and I always felt accomplished to be finally out of my 20s, out of the Stupid Zone. Of course, stupidity has a funny way of persisting, so it’s not as if my 30-year-old brain had suddenly developed into Highlander-Quickening-like omniscience. I’ll always have a copious abundance of stupidity cells floating around in my head, and I’ll just have to work hard to auto-correct every thought before it flies out of my mouth. That 20-something couple didn’t have their auto-correction properly attuned, so they sounded like a pair of immature idiots. Ten years later, I bet they’re really freaking out about the big 4-0. As for me, inching into my 40s, I’m thinking that throughout my 30s, during that entire decade, I was still wading about in the shallow end of the stupid pool.

So now I’m entering the age of brilliance. The middle of my life, when I’m finally starting to get it. Right? Yeah. Well, unfortunately, I’m finding that my Inner Old Man, the crotchety crab-ass who has been poking his head out for the last 20 years, is just about ready to take up the mantle of dominance. And I say this with full knowledge that 20 years from now I’ll be thinking of my young, stupid 40s, when life was getting thicker and I was still getting a bit dumber. I suspect that I will eventually temper my judgement, start to see the goodness in people, and finally move on from being an Old Man to becoming a Wise Man. For now, though . . .

This started while I was thinking of Facebook. That was going to be the blog post. I was going to title it “Facebooked!”, and proceed with an inventory of all the things that both delighted and infuriated me about the super-popular website/phenomenon. Last year represented a tipping point for Facebook. In a rush of just a few months, it seemed that everyone I know had established some level of Facebook presence. It culminated with Mark, my childhood friend, a person lost to time after having moved away in 1979, Facebooking me, reconnecting our lives in a rush of memories and updates. I had been trying to track him down, along with his twin brother Matt, for decades. I suppose that when you really want to find someone, you can make it happen. However, I never wanted to stalk him or pry him out of the world. I had no contact information, and I had been so generally unorganized throughout my life that I couldn’t even do much digging into my own past. Once information became interwoven with our culture, Googling didn’t help much, as Mark and Matt have a very common name with an uncommon spelling (and my impermanent brain didn’t help out), so I just couldn’t track them down. It was one of the great regrets of my life. These were my closest friends during a time when I was probably at my most creative. Everything we did was performance and collaboration, all pre-video-games, pre-vegetation. Those elements of Jimmy, the boy I once was, were lost forever. In November 2008, though, Facebook turned all of that on its head. For all of the weirdness and frustration of that site, that simple reconnection has probably been the most profound thing that the entirety of the Internet has done for me. Facebook represents the reality of the next-generation semantic web.

Meanwhile, I’ve decided that Facebook is a great big stinking turd of a site. It’s a time-sucker that promotes the meticulous construction of masks. It is working hard to destroy the subtleties of long-term relationships, collapsing all the people we’ve known into a list of “friends”. Friends. Really? My wife is a friend. My boss is a friend. Someone I hardly spoke to during high school and haven’t seen or thought about at all for 20 years is a friend. They’re all just fodder to add to the list, to keep that Friend number growing. And that’s the first thing you notice about anyone else. How many friends? Didn’t we all move past this when we finished high school? Does every network need to include some quantitative value, some demonstrable quotient of success? And what about the people who were once your friend? The amicable partings. We all have them. There is no great break-up or drama. You simply drift apart over time, accompanied by the mutual understanding that this is okay, that there is no ill will. And then, six or seven years later, you receive the Facebook request. Joe Blowass wants to be your friend. Well, yes, you were friends at one time, certainly. But that was back in your second year of college, or back in that service job, when you briefly connected, but, eventually, just found different paths in life. And, in the discovery of that divergent path, you realized that you really didn’t like Joe Blowass all that much. You would actually rather not see him again, and, if you ever happen to bump into him, you can be cordial and mature about it, but you won’t be giving him any means to stay in touch. And now he wants a declaration of friendship. My friends are the people who I hold dear to me throughout my life. There are pieces of my personality invested into my friends, elements of my soul. I believe in my friends. I love them. So no, I’m not going to say that Joe Blowass is one of my friends. It just isn’t true. Yet, is he an enemy? Of course not. There is no middle ground, though. Facebook demands that Joe is either a friend, or a not-friend. And either choice is a declaration, overriding the subtlety of the amicable drift. Now I have to drag it all out of the closet and actually say, “no, you are not my friend.” So you sit on that invitation for weeks. Every time you sign into the stupid site, there he is, with that silly thumbnail photo. Looks like he’s lost a little on top. And now he’s gone up to about 30 friends, faces from all over time and space. Ah, just ignore it. Just check the messages, erase the pokes and requests and surveys and calls for extreme navel gazing, close it all up and bolt out of there. And a week later he’s still there, with the fucking grin, and maybe it’s more of a style than actual hair loss, and 37 friends now, including someone you actually would like to contact, but she always had better taste than Joe. But she added him, so why not. Okay. Now he’s my friend. And friendship now means less than ever before.

And just when you’re going to leapfrog Joe and send a feeler out to that lost common friend, the one who’s thumbnail is in Joe’s growing list, you hesitate. What if she doesn’t want to hear from me? It’s been a few days now, and, being Joe’s friend, she can surely see that he has also added me. What if I’m her Joe? If I send her a friend request, she’ll probably accept it, just as she did for Joe. And it will be meaningless. Or, worse, she could actually say “no”, after having accepted Joe, shooting me straight into the gutter of lower-than-Joe, the lowest of the low. Fucking Facebook.

Meanwhile, it’s a party. A non-stop, 24/7 goddamned party. “Judy is baking cookies.” “Steven can’t wait for this day to be over.” Freddie has sent you a Little Buddies request. Would you like to be his Special Little Buddy? “Annie is having a drink.” Annie has now sent you a request to accept the “have a drink” app. Would you like to have a drink? Which drink are you? No, no, fuck off, Annie, get the hell away from me! No. You’re not my friend. None of you are my friends! I don’t care what you’re doing, and I don’t care if you’re late for work or feeling fine or injecting fluid into your cat or jazzed about tonight. Ugh! This is not a party, folks. Yet, with the constant tiny little updates, and the conglomeration of micro-statements flowing in from 50 different people, any boring old life sounds like its just crackling with excitement. We are all the stars of our group sitcom, our Sex in the City.

So . . . this is what has been popping around in my head. And as I filter it out, sorting, composing, trying to dig up my thesis, I realize that I’m just being an asshole. A cranky old man. And a hypocrite. I mean, I’m there, right in the middle of this fake party, and knee-deep in Twitter, as well. Twitter, however, is a bit more honest. It was designed as a broadcast tool for cell phone text messaging. “Jim is sitting in the back room, at the north end of the bar.” Twitter it, and you don’t have to bother individually texting all the people who were supposed to meet you at the bar, or the people who might otherwise be looking for you. Like everything else that’s online, it either evolves or stagnates, so now it has become a web-based micro-blogging tool. I admire the simplicity, the lack of pretense. Of course, like many other narrowly-defined web tools, there are folks out there over-thinking Twitter, trying to use it as a marketing device and even an educational tool. I’m a librarian, and I recently read a short article about other medical librarians using Twitter as a reference tool, broadcasting links to cool reference resources, bringing help to the people. Hey, if it makes you feel good about yourself, go for it. Some of us just call that spam, though. But maybe that’s just what the micro-blogging movement actually is: intermediary spam. Spam-lite. Keep it short enough, and we don’t feel as inundated with all of those informational blurbs, tweets and belches. Put it all together, though, and it just coagulates into static. “Follow” a few hundred Twitterers, and my voice eventually returns to what it really is: just one within millions. Meaningless.

An old neighbor of mine back in Park Forest, a somewhat cranky old man himself, once described his frustration over attempting to get his driver’s license renewed. He failed the driving test, claiming that the young DMV woman accompanying him was “picking the fly shit out of the pepper.” Man, do I love that phrase. It’s what I’ve been doing every day for decades. It’s easy to do, really. I think our brains are built for it. Wallowing in the details, winnowing away the days on jigsaw puzzles. The assumption, though, is that you can recognize the fly shit, that you know shit from Shinola. That’s the arrogance that usually gets you into trouble, or simply keeps you in your cranky little corner, gradually removing yourself from society. It’s dangerous and self-righteous, and even though I can recognize it, acknowledge this in myself, that doesn’t mean I’ve been able to alter this bottom line of bullshit.

FYI, we should be thankful that this woman from the DMV took the time to pick out the fly shit. This neighbor was shaky of both grip and mind, and was definitely someone who shouldn’t be commanding a vehicle of any sort.

So I spend far too much time going after the easy targets that tend to be interwoven with my daily routines. Such as Trader Joe’s. I’ve been at odds with TJ’s for years. Yes, delicious culinary luxury at okay prices. A good place for vegetarians and organic-o-philes. And friendly! Incredibly friendly. So friendly that I can hardly get out of the store without painting myself in puke. I’m sorry. I’m not a very enthusiastic shopper. I either get in there, list in hand, on target, on mission, super-efficient, or I wander the nebula of deliciousness, lost in a haze of exotic beverages, chocolate delights, 18 flavors of hummus and seven radically different varieties of organic farm-raised grain-fed antibiotic-free (but not necessarily pro-biotic) vegan eggs. So I either zip through the store, anxiously waiting in the checkout line, ready to complete my circuit, or I crawl into line after a lifetime of distracted shopping, dazed and stumbling as if emerging from the Sun’s Anvil in Lawrence of Arabia. Either way, the last thing I want to do is chat it up with the hipster at the register. Just shut up and tell me what I owe.

I’m in the minority on this one. For many of my fellow shoppers, Trader Joe’s is a complete package. Drift about the aisles, charmed by the “hand drawn” signs, sampling a bit of the bruschetta or limeade, finger of decision casually drifting over the fabulous array of chocolate-dipped/smothered plentitudes. It’s all champaign and peaberry. And top it all off with the cutie at the register, young, beautiful, so chatty.

Trader Joe’s is the flip-side of the indie record store. Attractive urban hipsters wait for you at the register. Their hair, clothes and piercings suggest a freedom of living you were never able to attain (unless you, too, work at a similar store). At the record store, friendliness is overshadowed by apathy or judgement. You’re never going to impress that clerk, and anything you say is always going to be either too droll or not droll enough. This is where Trader Joe’s diverges. They have gathered all the beautiful cool freedom-loving next-gen kids who are just too gregarious for the record stores. They don’t care what you look like. They love all, as if each one of them has been touched by Christ. Better yet, they will always support your purchase decisions.

They always take notice of a few random items, claiming that the $3 bottle of wine is their “favorite,” or that they’re positively addicted to those ready-made stinkless-shit sandwiches. Always a compliment, always the wondering of how your day is going, what you’re up to tonight. Girlfriends, boyfriends, knowing grins and camaraderie. The customers eat it up, soak it in, some of them visibly twitching and bouncing as they get closer in line, approaching that hipster, the sunshine epicenter. So by the time I make my way to the front of this processional, I’m up against it. I feel as if I have to be “on,” to fire back a hipster-ism or a witty remark or some other flake of bullshit that I see coming from every other person in line. And they all look like assholes, every one of them. The clerks are assholes for being so chipper about working at a grocery store. The customers are assholes for acting as if they themselves are hip, cool people who just happen to be loading their designer food into their $60K vehicles. And I’m the biggest asshole of all for being there, for grunting my way through the transaction, stymied and shrunken and simply unable to act my way through it. There are plenty of other scenarios in life where I have to amp up my personality, put on a cheery face, shoot the small talk. I’m not going to do it at a freaking grocery store.

“Hey, cool, love these maple cookies, how’s it going?”

“…”

End of conversation.

Why should I even care about any of this? Why spend all of these words complaining, being nothing but a grump? Here is what’s been happening. Listen.

The pleasantries of life have become transparent.

I have become increasingly intolerant of the myopic apathy of youth, the affectedness of it, droll, bored during a time when life is infinite and limitless. I am angry with the “me” that I see in others, to see them pissing away the same things in life that I, too, pissed away. I was recently looking through some older family photos, pictures from several generations ago. Each generation has shifted its tolerance. The youth culture is an offense to the previous generation. Yet, one generation later, there is an even more offensive youth culture, and then another one. The circle of tolerance shrinks with each generation, and I’ve been living with that downscaling.

At 40, life is better, more solid. Now that I have my footing, it would have been nice to feel this security 20 years ago, or at least understand that this period of contentment was coming. What would life be like now if I knew all of this 20 years ago? Would I be even happier now, more successful and stable? This is recursive thinking. It is the path to madness. I am always comparing my success to others, particularly now that the President is almost in my peer demographic. The more I question my choices and place in life, the more critical I am of everyone around me. So it’s better for me to be a grump than to be paralyzed by all of this overthinking. This is the Curmudgeon’s Code.

Meanwhile, I am shocked over how few of my fellow citizens care about such things as not pissing on the seat, not talking on their phones in enclosed public places, not ripping out the last paper towel without turning the little wheel at the bottom of the dispenser so that there is a fresh clean paper towel ready for the next person, not throwing cigarettes, coffee cups and other jetsam out of car windows as if the world was their god damned ashtray, not eating fried chicken on the train or letting go of yourself to such a degree that you yourself smell like fried chicken (bad salmonella Popeye’s leftover coagulated grease fried chicken, not fresh and tasty fried chicken), not drifting aimlessly down the middle of the steps as the CTA train is obviously 20 seconds away from pulling away, not pushing your strollers side-by-side on the bike path and taking up the entire width of the path while oblivious to my ringing bell and hey-hey-hey and all attempts at warning that my 30-mph bike might be a substantial risk to your adorable little baby’s perambulation, not standing on the left side of the freaking escalator, not being a dope, a mope, an idiot, a stupid idiot just like each and every single one of them . . .

As I lay it out, it just seems like a disease. More a sadness than a madness. If I capitalized on all of this anger, I would be in jail, toothless and black-eyed. So I channel it into impotence, with the occasional passive-aggressive hand gesture or cold, hard stare. It is ultimately better to just let it go. Turn off the news. Erase the nodes of comparison and just be happy with the gift of life.

Still, it’s nice to be plugged in, to follow friends and artists on Twitter. It’s nice to still feel like a part of a society I thought I hated. I suppose it would be a good time to hop onto Facebook and fill out a “Which classic cartoon character best describes your lifelong dread and self-loathing?” quiz, join the “Misanthropes Unite” group, or just raise some hell in one of the hundreds of Pro Life groups. Whatever makes us feel better. That is, whatever makes us feel better than others.